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For a while now I’ve been working on a mod for minecraft that allows the GPIO pins on a raspberry pi to be accessed from within minecraft. There’s a demo video below (you may be able to tell this is the first video I’ve ever made, be gentle!) but first some features….

I recently (well, a few months ago) started working for online retail company prettylittlething.com. Since then I’ve been getting back into the Magento way of doing things (along with managing their IT infrastructure… but that’s a whole other set of posts) and decided I might as well publish some of the minor tips and bits of code I’ve worked on.

Today I have a module that ‘fixes’ the default search order in magento.

By default, when you do a search in magento the results are shown in ascending order of creation. IE: older products are shown first. Now, I’m sure there’s some obscure reason why this is so (although it could just be that with no search order defined they’re pulled out in the order they went into the database) but anyway, after some googling and a bit of tinkering I have a fix for it.

I was going to stop making updates to this software, since the game itself now does much of what I set out to do… however, after some feedback on the forum thread (which is here by the way) I decided to carry on adding features etc.

So, I’ve added:

Moving entities
Deleting Entities
Regenerating entity IDs (this is useful if you export / import into the same savegame…each entity needs a unique id, this generates new ones)

You’ll notice some functionality missing, but the important thing for this release is that the way I load / save data has been completely rewritten. I now use the same xml serialization libraries that the game itself uses…meaning that loading / saving is much, much quicker…and hopefully more stable.

So, this version can only do the basics (export / import ships) but it does it much quicker. Now I have a better base to work from I can start adding in more features.

Not much of an update, but space editor now displays a little status message when it’s doing something… should stop people thinking it’s locked up when in fact it’s just trying to export that 100k block monster of a ship 😀

Also fixed a bug when loading pilots… should be a bit more stable now.

Pretty big update today, I’ve finally (after like…a weeks worth of struggling) managed to get modular building working. This means you can construct ‘modules’ (ie: parts of ships), export them, then import tham and attach them to other ships.

Here’s how it works:

I use the ‘White inverted corner block’ as an attachment point (this isn’t configurable at the moment, but I’m hoping to make a new blocktype soon and use that instead. For now though, don’t use that white inverted corner piece for anything else). So, make your ‘module’ and stick one of those blocks on it. Pay attention to its orientation!

Now, export that module in space editor.

Then, create the ship you want to attach the module to. Put a white inverted corner piece where you want the module to be attached. Again, pay attention to the orientation… your module will be rotated so its attachment block is orientated the same way as the one on your ship.

It’s been pointed out that to use the import module option (which relies on the space engineers library) this version needs to be installed in the same place as space engineers, which (for the steam version) is in:

c:\program files (x86)\steam\steamapps\common\spaceengineers\

I’ll work on creating a proper installer for the next version, but for now you’ll have to manually stick the space editor executable in there.